Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [90]
I rubbed my chin. ‘We can’t just kill his thugs?’ I asked. ‘Your father—’
Archi shook this off. ‘You have the right of it, Doru. We need to strike back. Just killing his thugs might be enough. But we have to get them, or they’ll keep us off him. Right?’
Youth has its own logic. It isn’t like the logic of the assembly or even the phalanx. Archi was angry, and Penelope had made him brave – and she was right there, bolstering his desire to be strong. In youth logic, we had to put those men down.
Poor bastards. A pair of Thracian slaves with clubs. It was three hours later, and Diomedes was heading home. He’d bragged so long and so loud about the insult he’d given us that we’d heard him in the agora, ranting like an orator. Kylix tracked him for us, and we were waiting when he turned off the broad Avenue of the Artemision and cut up the hill through an alley that ran between the looming walls of rich men’s yards.
Diomedes saw me first. I was lounging against a wall, cleaning my nails with a knife that Cyrus had given me in my bag of gifts.
‘Look who it is,’ he said. ‘The cock-licker! Get him, boys!’
Sometimes, the gods are kind. And hubris is the worst of sins. Diomedes had, in a single day, spurned a guest-friendship, broken a solemn vow and bragged of it in the public places.
The two Thracians were big men, and tattooed like warriors, although slavers often tattoo a peasant to get a better price.
They split up and came at me quickly, no nonsense, one on either side. I backed past the gatehouse of the next house and then turned and attacked, going for the Thracian on the left. The thug on the right tried to take me in the flank and Archi emerged from the shadow of the gatehouse and gutted him.
It was Archi’s first kill, and it took him out of the fight. He just stood there, blood dripping from his blade, as the man writhed and screamed from the thrust into his kidneys.
The other man swung his club, and I backed away a step as they taught in Persia and Greece both, and then I swayed in and cut his wrist with the knife, and he dropped the club, but I was still moving – right foot past left foot, down cut – and suddenly he was sitting in the street with his guts around him.
I don’t think they had earned their tattoos. I fought Thracians later – real Thracians – and they were, and are, scary bastards who will swing at you when their lungs are full of blood.
Diomedes turned to run, but Kylix tripped him. Before he could get to his feet, I was on him.
Archi was recovering, although he was white as Athenian leather. ‘I killed him!’ he said. And then, ‘I killed him!’
‘If you so much as touch me, my father will have you ripped apart by dogs!’ Diomedes said. ‘Don’t touch me – I might be polluted by a family of prostitutes!’
He was a fool. We really should have killed him.
I grabbed his nose between my thumb and forefinger and broke it with a vicious twist. I’d seen a slave do it to another slave in the pits. ‘Bring your dogs,’ I said.
Archi kicked him in the groin while he writhed in the muck, his nose pouring blood. He kicked him quite a few times. In fact, it was then I discovered that my master wasn’t any nicer than I was.
We beat him pretty badly. I’ll save you the details. Except that when we were finished, we took a jar of Briseis’s paint and tied him to a pillar in the portico of Aphrodite and painted ‘I suck dicks for free’ on his back while he wept. Why the portico of Aphrodite? That’s where men sold their bodies in Ephesus. The boys cleared out while we did our work. They knew a revenge beating when they saw one.
We sneaked back into the house by the slaves’ entrance. We thought, I think, that if we weren’t caught coming in, Hipponax would swear to our innocence. Or some such adolescent foolishness.
The whole house was dark – it was late. Dinner had been served, and we’d no doubt been missed – so much for our so-called plan. And we were both covered in mud and blood and worse.